To the place, I berong!
What do you get when you mix American country music with Japanese musicians? Something like this:
Sammy Yama & the Lucky Strikes
This is something you don’t see every day. A Japanese band with people on bass, guitar, violin and ukulele, covering John Denver songs. And the hats. Gotta love the hats. Except that dude on the left. Is he not feeling the country spirit? He is the only one with an electric instrument. Maybe he’s too cool for a cowboy hat?
But where does one go to see a band like this? The Kichijouji Music Festival might be a good place to start. I went there yesterday and today. It was a pretty good time (bad coverbands notwithstanding). I hung out with Tracey and Rob Pongi, shooting video, knocking back Chu-His and chowing down on gyoza. Fun and tasty!
My favorite act was Cool Nagasaki and Happy Skies. They were an absolute blast. Ukuleles, audience participation and great original songs. Well, they could’ve been covers, but they were all in Japanese, so I couldn’t say for sure if they were covers or not. Either way, they were great. I’ll have a video of them up before too long. (I have to pass a few tapes back and forth with Rob to make sure we’ve both got the clips we need.)
Hopefully I’ll have good enough audio to toss up an MP3 or two to give you a better feel for the bands I liked.
And so you can laugh at the ones I didn’t.
^.^